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Creating a successful mobile strategy is far tougher than it appears and can require rethinking the entire corporation, including business processes, the democratization of access to information, and updated IT systems throughout the organizations, Forrester analysts argue in a new book, The Mobile Mind Shift.

This rethink will require the strong hand of a CIO or CDO, who may need to restructure IT development towards teams capable of identifying new services that fit the overall strategy of customer mobile engagement. These executives also may lead efforts toward new business processes to meet those needs. Building internal applications for a mobile sales force, for example, could involve providing sales people with access to systems they don’t usually have, like customer loyalty records and transaction history, they said.

Businesses pursuing a mobile strategy also could benefit by establishing a center of mobile excellence, a shared resource where mobile efforts could be measured against overall strategy, authors Ted Schadler, Josh Bernoff and Julie Ask recommended.

In surveying mobile efforts in a variety of industries, from banking to travel, the authors found that most businesses already are behind. “They’ve gone from ‘should I do it?’ to ‘this is a lot harder than I thought,” said Mr. Bernoff. One reason it’s taken so long for companies to get their mobile strategies right is that it was difficult to know when new technologies were going to be adopted by consumers, and companies didn’t want to spend a lot of money before they had to, he said. Also, existing business processes can cause organizational “inertia,” he said.

Companies “will have to spend a lot of money” to catch up, added Mr. Schadler. He cited the case of Home Depot Inc., which said it would have to spend $1.5 billion to improve its supply chain and other back-end systems—what Home Depot called “interconnected retail.” That spend is directly related to improving the mobile experience for contractors who want to place supply orders from their phone, Mr. Schadler said.

But those expenses mean little compared to the dramatic shift in consumer expectations, driven by the smartphone. If one business can’t engage customers on their mobile device, those consumers may seek out another business that will. “The expectation people have is not expectations of the brand – they expect [a great mobile experience] with everything,” Mr. Bernoff said.

In this second article in a two-part series, Sonny Garg, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at Exelon Corp., the $27.4 billion competitive energy provider based in Chicago, describes the structure and inner workings of his emerging technologies team.